


every other page is a mirror

by SoDoRoses (FairyChess)



Series: Love and Other Fairytales [1]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Ableist Language, Adoption, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Biting, Bullying, Changeling!Logan, Changelings, Elementary School, Existential Crisis, Fae & Fairies, Gen, Harm to Children, Mentions of Dissection, Panic Attacks, Pinching, Self-Injurious Stimming, ass-backwards child handling theories, grossly incompetent teacher, its not super graphic and its not malicious but it is there, none of this stuff is like super heavy theyre all six years old keep in mind, small amounts of blood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 10:07:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15749508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FairyChess/pseuds/SoDoRoses
Summary: The faeries of Wickhills will take anything from you they think they can keep. The people of Wickhills are willing to give up almost anything. Dot Sanders is not willing to accept this, and neither are her sons





	every other page is a mirror

**Author's Note:**

> title is from the poem "Talking Shit To Sadness" by Sara Brickman

Ask three people how to get to Wickhills, Ohio, and you will get four different answers.

A lot of the older folks said to take 93 south from Logan.

The Adams boys, who’s sole contribution to the local economy was to provide teenagers with highly illegal moonshine out of an ancient still made from an even more ancient engine block, seemed to think it was north of Nelsonville.

Lila Quickel, the dentist’s daughter, said that it simply had to be east of Wayne National Forest, because her family had to drive through it to get to Athens, where her brother was going to college. This was in spite of the fact that the rest of her family said they drove north to Athens through Vinton Furnace.

And Hazel Coughenour, who nobody was really sure how old she was because everyone who was alive could only remember her being old, insisted they were in West Virginia.

You’d think this would make it so nobody could get anywhere, but really it just meant everybody got there a different way.

The population was five hundred humans on the outside, about three times that in deer, and about five times that in other things. It’s two biggest streets, Main and Fletcher, were both about a mile long, and where they met in the middle of town there was a rusted fountain full of rainwater and probably tetanus.

People asked how to get to Wickhills all the time – the phone company, coming to fix a line, or the Sear’s delivery men, trying to get a new washer to its rightful owner. The directions were always different, but everyone still seemed to find it just fine. None of them stayed long, in spite of the fact that they often wanted to. Wickhills was beautiful in every season, dense forest and hilly terrain as far as the eye could see; striking in the winter, lush green in the summer, and exploding with fiery, vibrant colors in the fall. It was an easy place to fall in love with.

But the  _people_  of Wickhills were standoffish and rude, they said. Shooing visitors out the door as soon as their work was done, gruff and insistent. Some of the older people even whacked their guests with brooms and other household objects until they fled. It was common, almost expected, for these haggard employees to return muttering darkly about how nobody in their right mind would want to go back to such a backwards, hateful place.

They hardly ever looked back, to the dozens of tense eyes watching them go, and they never heard the collective sigh of relief when their trucks finally drove out of sight. The people of Wickhills know something the visitors never learn. Not unless it’s too late.

It’s easy to get to Wickhills. But if you stay for even a day, it’s very,  _very_  hard to leave.

* * *

Dorothy Marie Galloway was born in Wickhills Rural Hospital, in bed number 17 of 25.  Nominally, the attending physician was Dr. Sherwood (seeing as he was one of only two doctors in the town, the other being the dentist) but everybody knew the only person anybody trusted to help a lady give birth was May Gage, who had been the midwife to every mother and child in Wickhills since before even little Dorothy’s parents were born.

The first week of Dorothy’s life was an endless pass from the cradle of one set of arms to the next. She had three brothers and a father who were elated to have a little girl in the family.

The only person who did not seem happy about Dorothy’s birth was her mother.

When she was old enough to hear the story – from her brother’s mouths, because her father still sometimes said, out of the blue “you look just like her,” and then his face would go pinched and pale as cream, and he would go out to the shed, where Dorothy was not allowed to go, and not come back for hours.

Her brother’s told her it was not her fault. It was theirs, disregarding their mother’s strange behavior as tiredness from giving birth as old as she was. They didn’t notice her vacant staring, or her sudden tendency to scratch her hands, or the crumbled brown leaves that were scattered across the floor of her bedroom, hidden in her pillows, tucked between folds of her blankets.

Until one day, their father came to check on her, and there was only a tree branch in the bed, draped in her favorite nightdress.

“Mama was a stock,” said Dorothy.

“No,” her oldest brother said pointedly, “Mama was a human, just like me and you. But the fairies took her and replaced her with a stock, and by the time we noticed it was too late,”

“Is that why I have to wear so many daisies,” Dorothy grumbled, gesturing to the pockets sewn into the sides of her skirt, stuffed to the brim with daisies as well as bright red berries and a few cut iron nails with holes drilled into the heads, looped on a string.

“We make you wear the daisies because if anything happened to you we would… we would be very sad,”

So Dorothy, her pockets full of daisies and honeysuckle berries, grew up in a house armed to the teeth against fairies. She knew every trick, drilled into her head practically before she could speak. She knew which trees were safe to hide under, and which trees she should never touch. She could turn her coat inside out while running in less than 6 seconds. She carried bags of dried field corn to spill if she was being chased, had iron pegs in the soles of her shoes, and bells sewn on the hems of all her clothes.

Dorothy lived down the street from Larry Sanders her entire life. The first time they met, she was 6 and he was 8. She told him her name was Dorothy, and he called her Dot, and she never answered to anything else ever again.

Dot grew up loved, even if she had stricter curfews, shorter play times, and always had a brother or father hovering at her shoulder, glaring at anybody who came near. She thought, there are worse things than being too safe. She thought, if someone had been taken from me, I would be paranoid too.

She never thought she’d have to test that theory.

* * *

The morning of the tenth day after her son Thomas was born, Dot lifted the baby in the crib into her arms, paused for a moment, and said, “Well, that’s no good,”

The baby seemed to sense her upset and started to fuss. She hesitated for a second, then began to rock him gently.

“Larry,” she called down the hall, “We have a bit of a situation, dear,”

Larry called all the neighbors, lit the fireplace, and put on a pot of coffee. Dot moved the crib into the kitchen, put on her reddest shirt, and began to pull things out of the cupboards; flour, baking soda, salt, measuring cups and spoons. From the lower cupboards she produced jars of dried shamrocks, red berries, iron nails and tarnished silver jewelry.

A dozen people or more showed up; Dot wasn’t playing very close attention. They baked bread and filled bowls with salt. Some people went out into the forest behind the house and came back with their arms laden with branches – rowan and hazel and red verbena, more shamrocks and scrubby st. john’s wort. Larry kept the baby entertained with his keys, and occasionally he and Dot made eye contact that became increasingly distressed as the day went on.

As the sun began to lower in the sky, Dot took a deep breath and went to the fireplace. She held the iron poker in the fire and carefully did not look at the baby boy in the crib. The poker turned red, then orange, but she held it there quietly until it was white and glowing.

When she went over to the crib, the little boy – the little boy who was not Thomas, whose eyes were too wise and too steady and the unnatural color of quicksilver – looked directly at her.

Dot ran the index finger of her free hand down the side of the little boys face, and pressed the poker to his shoulder.

He wailed, so high and so loud that every glass in the cupboards shattered and Dot’s ears rang, and the smell of burning sassafras filled the whole house.

Larry scooped the little boy up from the crib, cradling him and trying to soothe his cries. Dot felt nauseous and slightly dizzy, but she turned to her open front door, already knowing what would be there.

The faery woman was too tall, her eyes too big, and her hair too long – her skin was the ashy gray-ish white of burnt wood and her eyes were a blue so pale she seemed to have only two tiny black dots of her pupils, making her look slightly deranged.

She did not speak, but she held out the bundle in her arms, and Dot calmly took back her son.

The crying of the other child had set Thomas to shrieking at well, but Dot just held him as tight as she dared and bounced him, knowing it was as much for her own benefit as his.

The faery woman took a step toward Larry to take back her own child, and Dot moved in between them.

“No,” she said, and she was internally very proud of herself that her voice did not shake.

There was a pause, in which the temperature of the room seemed to drop several degrees, and the faery woman spoke with a voice that sounded like frost on seedlings.

“Give me my son,”

“He is our son,” said Dot, her voice calm and steady “You gave him up. You can’t trade a child like a toy. You were willing to let him go, and he deserves better than that,”

The faery woman laughed shortly, though it sounded more like the sharp cry of a bird and made Dot feel like she was getting an ice pick to the temples. “You are a fool, even for a human. This is not a negotiation,”

“You’re right, it isn’t,” Dot replied, “This is our house, and these are our sons, and you are not welcome here,”

The faery’s face twisted, and she looked even less human like that, snarling and cold, her lips pulled back over sharp and glinting teeth.

“He will never be content here. You are not doing him a  _kindness_ , you misguided-,”

“Get out,” said Dot firmly.

The faery shrieked and the wind that whipped through the house almost knocked Dot to the ground, but when the air stilled and she looked up, the door was shut and she was gone.

Dot exhaled slowly, her knees shaking, and some of the neighbors were grumbling about Dot inviting disaster, but when she turned Larry grinned at her and crowded into her space, putting the boy’s heads right next to each other.

“Look, Thomas,” she said gently “This is Logan. He’s your new brother,”

* * *

Logan and Thomas Sanders were not twins. Logan knew this. It almost didn’t make a difference.

Of course everybody in town knew that Logan was a changeling. Gossip traveled through Wickhills faster than you could drive through it; that was too big of a fact to be kept secret. Even if it were possible, his parents wouldn’t have tried. Logan never felt unloved or lesser. There were people in town who did not approve, but Dot and Larry made sure every day to assure Logan that that was a fault in them, and not him.

It did not make a difference in how he was treated. The differences were in the small things.

When Thomas threw a temper tantrum, the worst case scenario was that he might break a toy. When Logan threw one, every house on the block woke up to spoiled milk for three days. There were household objects he couldn’t touch; the fire poker, the garden gate, the rowan tree in the backyard.

He could not wear the protections the other children did. Daisies made him sneeze, hazel made his eyes water, and the juice of red berries gave him a rash. But Thomas could, and as long as Logan didn’t stray too far from his side, he was protected by proximity.

This turned out to be no problem as the brothers grew up. The neighbor’s said Logan was Thomas’s shadow, and this was long before Logan was old enough to understand it was supposed to be an insult.

Where Thomas shouted and careened through the yard, scraping his knees and staining his clothes, Logan could lay on his stomach in the grass and watch a caterpillar eat a leaf for hours. Where Thomas laughed, Logan stared, quiet and solemn in a way his mother found endearing and other people found unsettling. Thomas made friends with anyone who would hold still long enough but Logan’s only friend was, well, Thomas.

He rarely cried, and even more rarely spoke, and when he did it was in full sentences, carefully enunciated, eloquent and precise.

“Precocious” was about the kindest way anybody described him.

Once, Dot knocked over a jar of poppy seeds and Logan, unable to restrain himself, sat on the linoleum  and counted every single one.

By the time he was finished, it was four in the morning and his father had long since put Thomas to bed as he loudly complained that it wasn’t fair that Logan got to stay up and he didn’t. But after Thomas was asleep, Larry had come back down, and both his parents had sat on the kitchen floor and kept him company until he was done.

So yes, some things were different from actually being twins. But, thought Logan (who was six and very smart, thank you) these differences were not important. Some of them were even improvements – they did not share a birthday, for one, Logan being ten days younger, which he was eternally grateful for. They had very different ideas of what constituted “fun,” and as much as he hated to admit it, if they had to share a birthday party Logan was sure he would never get a word in edgewise.

It was at that same age that Logan learned that to some people, it made a much bigger difference.

Sadie Wagner was boring, which in Logan’s book was just about the worst thing a person could be. She didn’t like bugs like Mom, and she didn’t read to him like Dad (even though he could do that himself, but he liked it better when Dad did it), she didn’t help him learn him new things like the teachers, and she wasn’t Thomas. These were the traits six-year-old Logan found valuable in a person, and Sadie Wagner had none of them.

But Thomas said she was his friend, and that meant Logan had to be nice to her. When Thomas told him this, Logan protested vehemently.

“That means I have to be nice to  _everybody_ ,” he said, as though this was the height of misfortune, “Because you say everyone’s your friend. I can’t be nice to everybody. I’d never get anything else done,”

Thomas rolled his eyes, “I just mean don’t  _tell people_  you think they’re boring, Berry. It’s mean,”

“You keep saying that, but you haven’t explained how. It’s a value-neutral descriptor, not a judgment-”

“Big words, la, la, la, I don’t know what you’re saying,” said Thomas, gripping Logan by the shoulders and shaking him.

Logan sighed and stared beseechingly at the ceiling of their room. “It’s not mean if it’s  _true,”_

“That’s  _also_  a mean thing to say, Logan!”

So Logan had to be nice to Sadie. Even though Sadie was boring. She was Thomas’s friend. It was important to Thomas and Thomas was important to Logan.

These are the things Logan repeated to himself as Sadie flung yet  _another_  crumpled paper fringe into his hair.

They were in first grade now, and because they went to school all day instead of a half day, they had two teachers and Thomas and Logan were, for the first time ever, separated. Logan had Mrs. Quickel in the morning and Miss Cordray in the afternoon, while Thomas had them the other way around. The only time they were together was lunch and recess. After three weeks, Logan was finding this far more upsetting than he thought he was going to.

“Do you all have the ten family photographs I asked you to bring in yesterday?” said Mrs. Quickel.

“Yes, Mrs. Quickel,” chorused most of the students, all except for Bobby Bowen, who was ignoring the teacher entirely and gluing several small objects Logan couldn’t quite make out to his desk (though the desk was actually Danny Hart’s, who was in Thomas’s class), and Logan, who thought Mrs. Quickel’s insistence on all of them answering in unison was very stupid.

“Your assignment is to put the ten photographs in order from oldest to newest. If they don’t have dates and you don’t know how old each one is, try to make your best guess. What season was it in the picture? How old were you? I’ll come around and help you if you need it,”

Logan sighed and glanced at the photos. He started pushing them into order with his index finger, wishing the teacher hadn’t already confiscated his book for the day after she caught him reading while they were going over the spelling words.

His argument that he shouldn’t have to go over the spelling words with everybody else if he already knew them – complete with attempted demonstration, during which he covered his eyes and began to recite them from memory – did not go over very well.

“You’re gonna fail ‘cuss you’re doing it wrong,” said Sadie, leaning towards him across the space between their desks.

“We’re putting the pictures in chronological order,” Logan replied, “It’s not hard,”

“Yeah, but we were supposed to bring in pictures of our  _family,”_  she sneered, “You brought in pictures of  _Thomas’s_  family,”

That brought Logan up short.

“What?” he said, wrinkling his nose in confusion, “That doesn’t make any sense. Thomas is my brother. We have the same family, Sadie,”

Sadie rolled her eyes and gave an exaggerated sigh.

“You aren’t  _really_  brothers, dummy. You’re a  _fairy,_ and Thomas and Mr. and Mrs. Sanders are  _people,_ ”

“I’m not dumb,” said Logan, automatically, because that, at least, was a familiar insult. The rest of the statement however, was giving him trouble.

“Yeah, you are,” she sneered, “Because you didn’t know they’re not your family. You have a fairy mom, and a fairy dad, and probably gross toad fairy brothers and sisters,”

Logan’s hands were twitching on his desk and his ears were starting to ring. “No- no I don’t. I wouldn’t- I would know them, if I had a fairy family, that doesn’t make sense,”

“The Sanders’s are just keeping you ‘cuz you talk weird and they think it’s funny. But if you’re bad they’ll leave you in the forest so your dumb fairy mom can come get you,”

“I only have one mom!” snapped Logan, his voice cracking.

“Yeah, and she’s a  _fairy,”_

“ _Mom_  is my mom!”

“Mrs. Sanders  _isn’t_  your mom!”

“ _Falsehood!_ ,” and as Logan shouted the windows rattled. The room fell quiet.

“Logan Sanders, we use our inside voices when we talk to our friends,” said Mrs. Quickel after a long pause.

“She’s  _not_  my friend!” Logan spat, “She’s telling lies _,_  and I’m not friends with liars,”

“We don’t call each other names, either,” Mrs. Quickel said sharply. “Go flip your card,”

“But she-!”

“ _Now_ ,”

Logan was so mad he thought his head might pop. His nails dug into his palms as he marched towards the front of the room to the hanging display where all their cards were held and flipped his from yellow to orange. Orange meant no recess, which meant he wouldn’t get to see his brother until he went home for the day.

Logan glared at Sadie. Sadie smirked back.

Logan didn’t get recess very often.

It was usually because of Sadie.

At lunch Thomas waved at him, but once Logan had his food Mrs. Quickel came and pulled him out of line.  Logan looked back at his brother and shrugged helplessly as he was led back to the classroom.

Mrs. Quickel let Logan take his food to one of the art tables in the back and sat next to him. He waited, wondering why she seemed to think he hadn’t been punished enough.

“Logan,” she said, in the voice grown-ups used when they didn’t like him but were trying not to let him know. “Why don’t you tell me why you shouted at Sadie this morning?”

“She was lying,” said Logan.

He  _didn’t_ say, “I already told you that and you made me flip my card for it,” but he really,  _really_  wanted to.

“What did she say that made you call her a liar?”

Logan bristled angrily. Nobody ever believed him. Nobody ever  _listened._

“Sadie said my Mom and Dad weren’t my real parents, and that Thomas wasn’t my brother, because I’m a changeling,” Logan said, trying not to sneer or slam his fists on the table or scream or tear his hair out or-

He took a deep breath and let it out through his teeth.

“And I called her a liar because she was  _lying_ ,”

Mrs. Quickel pursed her lips, the way she always did right before he got in trouble, and the angry feelings were quickly becoming the loudest ones in his head.

“You shouldn’t have called her a liar Logan,” she admonished, “You already knew you were a changeling. That was all Sadie was trying to say,”

Logan started pinching the loose skin of his hand in frustration.

“No, she  _wasn’t_. She said they weren’t my family because she was being  _mean_ ,”

“Logan,” Mrs. Quickel said sharply, “What have I told you about saying ‘no’? It isn’t nice to say ‘no’ to a grown-up,”

Logan didn’t know if “no” could be a feeling (he wasn’t very good at feelings – that’s why he had Thomas) but if it could be, he was definitely feeling it now.

Mrs. Quickel sighed, and this time she did look genuinely contrite. “I would just hate to call your parents again, Logan. It’s only been a month of school and they’ve already had to come in twice. I’ll tell you what – it’s Thursday. If you make it to the bell and your card stays orange, I’ll only mark it as yellow for the day. And then if you’re good tomorrow, you’ll only have one orange this week and I won’t have to call your parents,”

Logan knew better at this point than to argue with her. He cast a sour look at the card board, with Sadie’s the very last one, green as it had been since the very first day of school.

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said flatly, wishing with all his heart that he could have just stayed with his brother.

* * *

Miss Cordray was a  _much_  better teacher than Mrs. Quickel. Logan liked her  _so much_.

Unfortunately, that didn’t mean he got in trouble any less.

Miss Cordray hardly ever made him flip his card though, even when he talked without raising his hand, or cut someone else’s answer off, or interrupted to correct them. Mrs. Quickel used words like “rude,” and “disregard for classroom rules.”

But Miss Cordray said things like “enthusiastic,” and “eager to participate,” and Logan was smart enough to know those were just nice ways to say the first things but they made him feel better anyway.

But right now was quiet time, everybody doing their assignments by themselves, and Logan had to stop himself every few minutes from chewing on the end of his pencil. A few days ago he’d gotten a splinter in his tongue and he didn’t want a repeat performance.

At the top of his paper was written “Fish,” followed by a list of various things fish needed to live. “Water” was at the top, and Logan was trying to think of all the things he and his Dad did to take care of the fish in the tank at home.

The fish were Logan’s pets, and the hamster in his and his brother’s room was Thomas’s. Sacajawea was suppose to be both of theirs when they got her, but animals didn’t like Logan very much. The fish were prettier, didn’t smell, and they didn’t run away or bite him, so Logan wasn’t upset about it.

Well. He wasn’t  _very_  upset about it.

When he’d filled the page, he went to flip it over to continue, but Miss Cordray was standing up from her desk and walking to the front of the room.

Logan panicked, because there were definitely more things that fish needed, he wasn’t even  _close_ to done, but maybe she wouldn’t call on him and he could keep writing if he was very sneaky?

“So, now that you’ve had a few minutes, who wants to go first with their list?”

Logan tried sink lower in his chair as subtle as he could, wishing someone else would volunteer so he didn’t get called on.

Sadie’s hand shot into the air, and she had that smug smile back in place and Logan felt the urge to slam his head into his desk.

Miss Cordray seemed surprised, because Sadie hardly ever raised her hand, but she smiled and called on her anyway.

“Okay, Sadie, you can go first. Stand up and tell us what animal you chose,”

Sadie hopped up out of her chair like she was spring loaded and flicked her paper out with a flourish.

“The animal I chose was a toad,” said Sadie, her voice ringing with delight.

Logan froze.

Miss Cordray’s smile was looking increasingly bewildered, but she nodded encouragingly anyway. “And what does a toad need to survive?”

“Toads need holes in the sticky gross mud, which is wear they live. Because they’re gross,” said Sadie, and she wasn’t even  _looking_  at him but he heard a couple of stifled giggles through the room and felt his ears burn with fury and embarrassment.

“Well… Okay,” said Miss Cordray.

“They also need food, and  _everybody_ knows that toads eat bugs and worms and other gross things. Toads  _love_  bugs,”

More scattering giggling, and Logan thought of the insect guide in his bookbag and silently fumed.

“The last thing toads need is water, because they live by scummy ponds in the woods far away from people because that’s where toads belong,”

Several students broke into peals of laughter, and Miss Cordray wasn’t smiling at all now, but she seemed at a loss for what to do.

“… Very good Sadie, you can sit down now,”

Sadie sat down, facing away from Logan, and her self-satisfied grin was visible even through the back of her head.

“Does anybody want to volunteer to go next?”

“I wonder if somebody picked changelings as their animal,” muttered someone, and the other kids erupted into delighted snickering.

“ _Who said that?”_  snapped Miss Cordray, cutting through the laughter instantly. The room fell into uneasy silence.

“That is  _not_  funny,” she continued, and Logan had never seen her look so angry. “How could you say that? How would you like it if someone said those hurtful things about you?”

Nobody answered.

Miss Cordray let the silence stretch on, thin and tense, until she shook her head.  

“I think we need more quiet time. Get out your math workbooks and turn to page 12,”

Several kids groaned, but Miss Cordray turned a sharp look on them and they got out the booklets.

“Raise your hand if you need help,” she said. She went to her desk and sat down heavily.

Logan got out the workbook, trying to focus on anything other than the bubbling pit of anger in his stomach. But no matter how hard he concentrated on plus and minus signs in front of him, the anger didn’t go away. If anything, it got worse – got hotter and denser, until it was like a lump of white-hot lead in his chest.

He glared at the back of Sadie’s head, shaking with resentment and frustration. He didn’t even realize he was biting his hand until he tasted copper.

He yanked his hand out of his mouth, shoving it under the desk and out of sight. He wrapped the hem of his black shirt around it and continued the math with his other hand.

After several minutes, something landed on his desk – a crumpled wad of paper.

Logan glared at it for a good 20 seconds, debating if he should just shove it to the ground and ignore it. Knowing Sadie, she would probably just shout that he was throwing trash on the classroom floor.

And in some deep, tiny, quiet part of him, he wondered if maybe Miss Cordray yelling had been enough that someone – anyone – wanted to apologize to him.

He pulled the ball apart with his fingers, and there in the wrinkled paper was a picture of him.

He knew it was him because nobody else in the class – in the grade, in the school, in the  _town –_ had pointed ears, even if the picture made them exaggerated and as big as his head. He had weird round fingers in the picture, and it took several seconds of bewildered fury before he realized they were supposed to be  _toad_  legs.

He heard a tearing sound, and realized he had clenched his fist around the drawing so hard that he’d ripped in two, almost three pieces. His hands were shaking and he forced himself to move his head and look to the front of the room.

Sadie was grinning, with her stupid smug face and her stupid ponytail and her stupid  _stupid_ normal human ears and he  _hated_ her, hated her so much it was like a physical presence, and Logan wished he could make her feel even a little bit as horrible as she made him feel every single day he’d been in first grade.

There was a knock.

Everybody looked up towards the sound, including Sadie, who looked down at her own desk in surprise.

It knocked again. And then another.

Everyone was looking at Sadie now, in various stages of confusion and curiosity. Miss Cordray looked up from her desk.

“Who is making that noise?”

Nobody answered, but the desk knocked again, this time so hard that the lid jumped. Hesitantly Sadie lifted it up.

And let out a blood curdling scream.

She leapt from her desk, the top flying open, and there, next to her books and pencils and crayons, were dozens of croaking brown toads.

* * *

Logan sat in the back of the car, refusing to even look at his parents or his brother. He had spent the rest of the school day in ISS, and nobody had even come into the room. The principle had herded him into it, shut the door, and locked it behind him. He’d been sheet-white the whole time.

As he’d walked from the office to his parent’s car, Mom’s arm wrapped tightly around him, he had felt dozens of silent, terrified eyes, watching him until he’d climbed into the backseat and shut the door behind him. The collective sigh of relief had been almost audible.

All the anger had seeped out of him like he was a sieve, and he felt – he didn’t know what he felt. Sort of hollow, like a rotten tree trunk. Maybe sad. He wasn’t sure.

He barely waited for the car to stop in the driveway before he was out of it, thumping through he grass and bypassing the house, shoving against the hot pad sewn around the iron gate so he could touch it.

He sat heavily underneath the young oak tree, on the other side of the yard from the rowan – that he  _also_  couldn’t touch – and gritted his teeth against the tears so hard his jaw clicked.

He’d never been so angry as he’d been at Sadie – he didn’t know there was even enough room in him for so much feeling. But there was – and it had overflowed into magic. More powerful magic than he’d ever done.

Spoiled milk was one thing. Burns on his hands from bumping the gate, sneezing for weeks when the daisies blooms, predicting the weather – little magic. A little bit fey. A little bit not-human.

Summoning real skin and bone things? Or worse, if he’d  _made_ them?

Slowly he reached up and ran his hand along the slight, barely noticeable point of his ear. He knew his eyes were silver, and he was a little skinnier, a little paler than Thomas. He  _looked_  human.

He turned his hand over to the bite mark. Red blood – but sharper teeth maybe, than they strictly should be.

Was he different on the inside then? If they cut him open and looked inside would he be all jumbled up, strange and alien, with his stomach and lungs and heart all in the wrong places?

He pressed his hand to his chest next, to the  _thump-thump_  and the sense of pulsing blood, the sense that he could feel it moving through him, and it had never occurred to him until know that maybe not everyone could feel it like he could.

Was that why he felt things wrong? Always muted and shallow or intense as a forest fire, one extreme or the other, never simple, never  _normal_ feelings. Was it his  _brain_  that was a fairy? Or his mind or his  _soul_  even – did he  _have_ a soul?

He hadn’t even heard Thomas coming until he thumped down into the grass beside him.

Neither of them spoke.

Thomas started picking grass, one blade at a time. When he found a suitably wide one, he held it to his lips and honked at Logan.

Logan didn’t return his smile.

“Everyone’s afraid of you,” said Thomas bluntly. “Everybody at school I mean. And the teachers. Maybe Mama and Dad, I don’t know yet.  _I’m_  not, but I know you won’t hurt anybody, you were just playing a prank,”

Thomas was usually so good at picking out other people’s feelings, especially Logan’s. It was a little strange to hear him be so off base.

“But probably if you just don’t play anymore pranks, everyone’ll forget about it,”

_Way_ off base.

“Thomas, they’re not gonna let me come back to school,” he said flatly.

“What? Why wouldn’t they?”

“Because I’m a fairy,”

Thomas scrunched his face up in confusion, “I know  _that_ , I’m not  _dumb_. And you’ve always been a fairy,”

_Not like this,_ thought Logan.

“You don’t get it,” snapped Logan, “and I’m not explaining it to you,”

Thomas’s expression turned to hurt.

“But- you always explain things to me. And I explain other things to you. that’s why we’re brothers, so we can explain things to each other,”

“I’m not your brother,”

Logan regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth, but it wasn’t like he could take them back – they were  _true_.

“Wh… what?”

“I’m not,” Logan repeated flatly. “I’m not even human. I’m not a _person_. I’m a fairy with- with fairy parents and brothers and sisters, I’m a  _freak-”_

There was a broken sob, and Logan’s head snapped up.

Fat tears were rolling down Thomas’s face, looking both furious and like Logan had told him Christmas was canceled forever.

“I-what?” said Logan.

“H-how could you s-say that?” snapped Thomas.

“I – I just-”

“You might h-have a fairy mom but I only have one  _brother_ , you  _jerk_ ,”

Thomas shoved him.

Logan shoved him back.

“ _You’re_  a jerk!”

“I’m not a jerk, you’re a jerk! None of this would have happened if you hadn’t decided to prank Sadie just ‘cuz you don’t like her!”

The rage filled Logan back up so quickly that every bit of it spilled out of his mouth in a scream.

“ _Falsehood!”_

The tree branches shook with the force of his voice. His breath hitched and then he was sobbing.

“…Logan?”

Logan cried harder.

“Logan? I- I’m sorry,”

“Sadie said I’m not a person,” said Logan miserably, “She called me a toad and made a mean drawing of me and I don’t know what  _happened_ , I just got really angry and then the toads were there. I didn’t do it on  _purpose_ ,”

Once he’d started talking he couldn’t seem to stop.

“And now everybody’s scared of me ‘cuz I’m a  _freak_ , and you don’t like me anymore ‘cuz you like Sadie better than me and I  _miss_  you every day at school and you don’t even  _care_  and Mom and Dad are gonna pro’lly leave me in the forest and I don’t  _want_ a fairy Mom-”

“Berry! Berry we gotta have calm down time!”

Logan reached forward blindly and Thomas grabbed his hands, squeezing them until they felt almost swollen.

Logan squeezed back, and they sat under the shade of the oak until both their sobs subsided into little hiccups.

Logan let go first, wrinkling his nose at the tacky feeling of his face. He tried to clean it with his sleeve, but that just made his sleeve dirty, which didn’t make him any less upset.

“I don’t think you should have put toads in Sadie’s desk,”

Logan stared at Thomas incredulously.

Thomas grinned, at odds with his red eyes and sticky face.

“I think you should have put a  _possum_  in her desk,”

* * *

“Mama! Dad!” shouted Thomas as he barreled through the back door, Logan following slower behind him. “I’m gonna put a possum in Sadie’s desk,”

“You’re not supposed to  _tell_  people!”

“Whoa, we are not doing that,” said Dad, “That is a big ‘ol fat  _heck_  no on possums in Sadie Wagner’s desk,”

He smiled encouragingly at Logan, who arranged his face in a smile back. Dad grinned wider, and Logan let out a sigh of relief.

“You and me _,_ Tommy-bug,” Dad continued, “Need to have a talk about what ‘give him space’ means,”

“Give it up, Larry, he takes after me,” said Mom, and she leaned down into Logan’s space with a wet cloth held out in question.

Logan lifted his face obediently and she wiped the tears and the boogers off of him. He held up his sleeve and she sighed good-naturedly.

“Someday I’m going to get all  _three_ of you to stopped using your clothes as napkins,”

Dad pressed his hand to his chest, outraged. “Dot, darling, how dare you accuse me of such classlessness in my own home?”

“Very easily,” said Mom, but she was smiling. She threw the gross rag at him and Dad yelped and jumped out of the way.

“Alright, that’s it, everybody gets washed up! Hands, faces, new clothes, the whole nine yards,”

“We’re just gonna get dirty again before bedtime!” complained Thomas.

“Then you’ll do it again at bedtime,” said Mom. “Up! Go! March!”

“But Mooo _oooom,”_

“I don’t see marching!”

“ _Up_  we go!” exclaimed Dad, grabbing Thomas around the middle and carrying him under his arm like a basketball.

Mom held out her hand for Logan to take.

“You too, Loganberry,”

Ignoring her hand entirely, Logan threw his arms around her, resting his head on her middle.

“I love you, Mom,” he said, squeezing once and then letting go.

Mom touched his face with her fingertip. “I love you too, sweetie,”

Logan felt something inside him, like he’d been making a fist in his heart all day, finally relax.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] every other page is a mirror](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18094691) by [GoLBPodfics (GodOfLaundryBaskets)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodOfLaundryBaskets/pseuds/GoLBPodfics)




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